Installing Hyperledger Besu on Linux

DISCLAIMER: In October 2020 PegaSys was renamed to Quorum.

Although there are many ways to install software on a Linux machine, an accepted startard practice is to install on your Linux user’s home/bin folder. The following will help you install Hyperledger Besu on Ubuntu, and can be tweaked to many other distributions.

The Java JDK is a requirement for running Besu. Make sure its already installed and higher than version 11 by typing java --version. If it isn’t installed, follow these install instructions or type sudo apt install default-jdk into the terminal.

1. Download the latest binary from a trusted website (ie. the PegaSys website).

2. If it doesn’t exist, make the home bin folder.

cd ~
mkdir bin

3. Move the binary to the bin folder. Remember to replace <binary-filename> with the name of the file you’ve downloaded from step 1.

cd ~
cd Downloads
mv <binary-filename> ~/bin
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

4. Untar/unzip the downloaded binary. Depending on which file type you’ve downloaded, choose the extraction type.

If not present in your system, install unzip with sudo apt-get install unzip.

Untar:

cd ~
mkdir bin

Unzip:

cd ~
cd Downloads
mv <binary-filename> ~/bin
Code language: HTML, XML (xml)

You may now remove the original tar/zip file.

You may also want to rename the folder to besu.

Your bin folder should look like this now:

~/tmp/bin
$ tree -L 2
.
└── besu
    ├── bin
    ├── lib
    ├── LICENSE
    └── license-dependency.html
Code language: JavaScript (javascript)

5. Add Besu to your PATH environment variable. Adding a binary to your PATH allows you to run the executable from any folder on your machine, without having to point to it directly at each call.

Using your text editor of choice, add the following line to your .bashrc (or .zshrc, etc) file.

cd ~
cd bin
tar xf <binary-filename>.tar.gz
Code language: CSS (css)

6. Restart your terminal.

You should now be able to run Besu from any folder, open a terminal window and type besu -h and you will get the besu help output in the terminal.

Get more information on Besu here:

Docs
Code
Binaries
Wiki
Jira
Weblinuxbesututorial

This article was written by Felipe Faraggi and originally published on Kauri.